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Cost alerts

Cost alerts tell your team when spend crosses a line, so a runaway bill reaches you before the invoice does. An alert watches a cost figure against a threshold and, when it trips, sends a message to your notification channels.

Creating an alert

An alert has a few simple parts:

Setting What it means
Threshold amount The cost level that triggers the alert
Currency CHF or EUR, so the threshold matches how you think about the bill
Scope A single project, or the whole organisation
Enabled A toggle to activate or pause the alert without deleting it

Create as many alerts as you need, for example a per-project ceiling for each team plus one organisation-wide safety net.

How alerts are evaluated

Alerts are checked two ways:

  • On a schedule: a background job re-evaluates every alert at a fixed interval (every few minutes by default), so you do not need to be looking at the app.
  • On manual refresh: when you refresh cost data from the dashboard, alerts for that organisation are re-evaluated immediately.

When the watched cost is at or above the threshold and the alert is enabled, it fires.

What happens when an alert fires

  • A message is sent to every enabled notification channel (Slack, Teams, Discord, Pushover, email).
  • The event is written to the alert history, with the date, the cost value that tripped it, the message and the delivery status.
  • The alert's last triggered date is updated, which you can see in the alert list.

Throttling

Alerts are throttled so a threshold that stays crossed does not spam your channels repeatedly. You get told when the situation starts, not on every check.

Budgets and the 80% warning

Beyond hard threshold alerts, OpenWatch tracks budget burn. On the dashboard, a budget that has consumed more than 80% of its allotment is highlighted as a warning, giving you a heads-up before the limit is actually reached.

Good practices

  • Set thresholds slightly below the pain point, so the alert is a warning and not a post-mortem.
  • Use per-project alerts to give each team ownership of its own spend, and one org-wide alert as a backstop.
  • Make sure at least one notification channel is configured and tested, otherwise an alert can fire with nowhere to go.

Where to go next